[hluska]

You know friend, I understand how you feel. When I look out at the world, I see so much garbage that I can’t even believe it.

Then I hang out with my four year old. She doesn’t understand racism, politics or climate. But she knows that she really likes everyone, respects others pronouns and likes sharing what she has.

There’s hope. As cynical as I am, there is hope. And the fact that you feel so strongly fills me with as much hope as watching my little one learn about the fucked up planet she’s inheriting.

[bamboozled]

What happens to grow up to suck so hard?

Why can't we just look at each other and imagine the child that person once was, then maybe we'd care more about others like your 4 year old does.

[lotsofpulp]

Because allocating limited resources isn’t in the purview of a 4 year old. As you grow up, you begin to learn who wields the power and resources and how it’s allocated and what the consequences are for those who forgo it or can’t get it.

[bamboozled]

I actually do wonder though if in the end, it really matters?

Everyone with power ends up losing it, or acquiring some strife, maybe if we cared less we'd find out it wasn't that much of a concern anyway.

I mean, do people chose power or does power choose them? Would you appreciate it if you had it?

[kortilla]

The entire lifestyle of the west is mostly unsustainable if everything started getting allocated equally. So it matters to a lot of people.

[hluska]

This is beautiful writing and it deserves a reply, but for now I’m just going to read your words and wonder along with you.

I’ll edit this comment at some point but for now, thank you friend. This is beautiful and poignant. :)

Edit - I notice you edited your reply but I’m happy I got to read the original. You’re a beautiful writer.

[notabee]

On a positive note, doing this is a very good way to understand people. Even their bad actions make a lot more sense if you delve into some developmental psychology along with just engaging your intuition about what their inner 4 year old wants out of life.

On a negative note, I think most people convince themselves of being much more grown up than they actually are. Really it's far easier to just get meaner and more calloused to survive while suffocating the core self. Maturity is more like a deliberate and careful edifice built with a lot of work, self-reflection, and self-forgiveness. It's not a given that just getting older does that, other than the inhibitory part of the brain getting better at restraining the emotional part after adolescence. (Usually, unless trauma happens that's sufficient to get stuck in a particular development stage.)

[redvenom]

We are taught in Western and most other societies of today to numb pain. The problem is that we have knowledge of the problems of this world. I think if we allow ourselves to feel the pain of our knowledge and understand our existence through it, we can return to a childlike state and realize the pain is not something wrong with us, but our natural inclination and love for the world telling us that we are doing something wrong.

We may not be able to solve the problems created by our species, but if we learn to live with respect for the planet then we can at least know we are doing as much as we can with our own existence.

[oconnor663]

> Why can't we just look at each other and imagine the child that person once was

As hard as it is to generalize, I'd say it's because sometimes our needs aren't getting met, particularly our need for safety. When we feel like we're in danger, it's very hard to appreciate wonderful things. ("This person feels like they're in danger" is also a decent way to broadly sympathize with other folks, along the same lines as "imagine the child that person once was.")

[fsloth]

Thank you, this is beautiful and deep. I think I will try to imagine people as children and imagine them growing up more. Much easier to project loving-kindness that way.

[katbyte]

Because the adult that person is now often is the source of so much pain and anguish to others?

[xupybd]

It's a lie that kids are naturally good. Leave them alone long enough and it'll go Lord of the flies real quick.

[DeRock]

The lord of the flies was made up. Here’s an actual anecdote of what happens (spoiler, they work together): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

[konart]

>Here’s an actual anecdote of what happens

Sometimes this happens, sometimes not.

[LarvaFX]

Or it does always and not the other way around.

[tappio]

Have you considered that you might also be living in denial? As far as I know your brains are full of chemical reactions that make your little princess seem perfect. I'm a father as well and it is sometimes hard to distinguish "I love my kid and she's perfect" from "my kid is actually very kind". I hope the latter is true for you!

[hluska]

This is an interesting comment and I’ll reply with two points:

First, my kid can be a real little shit. :)

Second, I think about that a lot. My Dad and I have a close relationship and sometimes I wonder if that’s because we are personally compatible or whether there’s something biological that’s just beyond our consciousness. In terms of my kid, I wonder the same thing (particularly when she’s being a little shit).

I hope the truth is somewhere in the middle. I’m her dad so I’m very biased in her favour. There is an entire biological side that I don’t think my conscious brain has direct read access to. But I still hope that my little girl is perfect and stays this wonderful kind little angel.

[globular-toast]

> There’s hope.

There's hope because 4 year olds aren't racist and "respect pronouns"? I hate to break it to you, but no children are born racist and they will believe and copy whatever you tell them whether it's religion, racism or alternative pronouns. None of this puts food on the table, though, does it?

[glaugh]

My boomer parents were raised by parents who were taught not to tell their kids they loved them.

My (privileged) five-year-old has emotional tools that I didn’t have until I was 25.

I do think we’re generally getting better at raising empathetic kids. It’s not uniform, but it’s better.

[ricardo81]

I think you're too hard on the older generations.

They lived in a time where kitchen appliances were a new thing, most work involved manual labour and lots of time. Getting used to hardship and not whining about it was their way of getting through it. Tired? Tough!

There is a balance to be had which I usually sort by "needs" and "wants". There aren't many needs and the rest is a luxury.

[tommica]

I'm curious, why do you think having emotional tools is a "privilege"? I might be wrong in my understanding of the term, but isn't it more of a right than a privilege?

[xenocratus]

Nothing is either a right or a privilege, objectively speaking, so it can be a right in one historical/social context and a privilege in another.

[kazagistar]

Privilege is something good, unequally (and/or unjustly) distributed. Rights are something good that should be afforded to everyone. So there is a lot of overlap but also distinction.

Rights are an ideal, privileges are a material reality.

[golergka]

Having your right realized and not tampered is a privilege.

[rad_gruchalski]

> Then I hang out with my four year old. She doesn’t understand racism, politics or climate.

To put this in perspective: Hitler was once a sweet 4 year old. Stalin was one too. Mao? Yup. Putin? Sure he was. Everyone on this planet was once that sweet 4 year old not grasping any of what you mention. And yet, look where we are.

[lopmotr]

Pull yourselves together. The previous century had trench warfare, famines, WWII, The Khmer Rouge, the cultural revolution, the Spanish flu, polio, threat of a nuclear holocaust, threat of overpopulation, AIDS, Imperial Japan, Apartheid, lobotomies, etc. Most of that stuff is now under control and probably will be for your kid's entire life. There's no chance global warming will be anywhere near as bad as many of those things for anyone alive today. For even further in the future, we have no idea.

Your despair is probably a result of being fed emotionally manipulative stories from the news and social media for too long. The real world has never been better, and it hasn't stopped improving. Try looking at some of Bill Gates's writing for inspiration. That's somebody who's not afraid to see the bright side of life while not ignoring the dark.

[webmaven]

> Pull yourselves together. [snip 20th century bad stuff]. Most of that stuff is now under control and probably will be for your kid's entire life. There's no chance global warming will be anywhere near as bad as many of those things for anyone alive today.*

Umm. I'm pretty sure that drought, mega storms, wildfires, famine, and mass migrations of refugee populations (just to start) will spawn horrors in the 21st century at least as bad.

I mean, consider that some of the worst events in the 20th were essentially triggered by the great depression. As a civilization, we're going to have to withstand stressors far more severe than that before the 21st century is out.

[lopmotr]

You need to put some numbers to those disasters. We already have all of them without global warming. We're much better at coping with them than we used to as well.

[EdwardDiego]

Except a large part of humanity is _more_ vulnerable to them now due to population growth in vulnerable areas.

There's sufficient evidence that our response to climate change in the past was migration, sometimes by force.

[notabee]

People have put numbers to it. Climate scientists have been literally weeping in interviews because of what they know. These are things that you just have to read for yourself to get a sense of the scale of the problem. But here's some exercises if you actually want to learn about this and you're not just going to hand-wave away unpleasant notions:

1. Read about the Permian Triassic extinction event (The Great Dying). That involved somewhere between 1200 - 2000 ppm CO2. We're emitting CO2 at least an order of magnitude faster than what led to that event. We still have at least 800 ppm to go to get to that scale, but if the permafrost decides to start belching everything up, we'll be heading there very, very quickly. Feasibly by the end of the century.

2. Do the math on how much excess carbon is in the atmosphere right now compared to the ice core data from the past 800,000 years. That ranged from around 180 - 300 ppm that changed gradually on the scale of thousands of years. That range is what humans have lived in for the existence of our particular species. Now, take the extra 120+ ppm and determine just how much material that actually is. How much mass. Now, do the math on how much of that carbon an average forest can absorb. Or any of these direct air capture technologies.

There is so much data out there. It's easily available. It's far easier emotionally to just plaster over this with general skepticism and blind faith in technological progress though. You can sealion all you want, demanding other people produce things on a platter for you to digest, but you're not going to really understand until you look at it directly anyways. You don't have to be a climate scientist to crunch some of the numbers.

[lopmotr]

You should explicitly state the logic you're implying and the conclusions. That way, if there are any embarrassing mistakes, they'll be obvious. Are you saying that with 1200-2000ppm, we'll have another extinction event? That it will include humans? Also that we expect to reach that concentration in our childrens' lifetimes? Those claims together are certainly not what scientists predict, so I don't know if you're wrong or using some other logic that I didn't infer correctly from your words.

[cranekam]

None of those will compare to climate change. All of those events, bad as they were, were over in the relatively short term. Climate change is going to be all of that, a hundred times worse, and whatever anyone does at the time isn't going to fix it.

Your optimism is the result of living through the era of apparently limitless [0] energy and resources and the resulting development it has enabled. But the books don't balance. We can't possibly go on on this trajectory without the house falling down around us.

[0] not actually limitless

[girvo]

None of that will compare to the catastrophe that is climate change, if our understandings of the consequences are correct.

[SamReidHughes]

A 7.22% reduction in GDP compared to where it would be in 2100? [1]

That's 2-3 years worth of GDP growth right now.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa...

[tsimionescu]

This only factors in economic damage from the higher temperature. It's not looking at floods, extreme weather, and definitely not looking at second-order effects - mass migrations, increased risk of war etc.

It is an absurd fantasy to imagine that the only effects of global warming in the next hundred years will be economic contraction (though note that economic contraction YoY itself is almost unheard of in the US and Europe, and will bring dire consequences).

[SamReidHughes]

It's also an absurd fantasy that you can predict the future in technological advancements on a 100-year scale either. Not to mention the intractibility of climate modeling over that time period.

Considering a few years ago people were worried about the problems of jobs being automated away, you might imagine a little climate change creating extra work for people would be good for social cohesion.

But it's all just a bunch of bozos with PhD's and masters degrees.

[dredmorbius]

Nordhaus's Nobel is a fraud.

Steve Keen's done some excellent debinking.

Starting point:

https://evonomics.com/steve-keen-nordhaus-climate-change-eco...

TL;DR: Asssumming one can translate different lattitudes' GDPs to that of a planet undergone global climate disruption is ... an exceedingly dubious proposition.

[lopmotr]

What are those understandings? The only quantitative predictions I've seen are utterly tame compared to those 20th century problems.

[tsimionescu]

[0] shows estimates of sea level rise from ~0.5m up to 2.5m by 2100. This alone will induce catastrophic flooding in some of the world's most populous cities and regions.

[1] covers some estimates of how prevalent wet bulb temperatures of >35C (the upper limit for a healthy adult to survive outside in the shade) will become. Any heatwave in this area will kill many vulnerable people and will stop almost any outdoor economic activity.

These are just 2 easily quantifiable numbers that will directly make life much harder in the next century (and the problems won't stop in the century after that). The second order effects can also be imagined.

[0] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838

[lopmotr]

Thank you, but that doesn't quantify catastrophe. I mean numbers of dead, cost in dollars, etc. Maybe we can cope with those 35 degree events by staying in air conditioned buildings like people already do in SE Asia. Maybe cities can move. The world's biggest(?) (Shenzhen) didn't really exist at all 80 years ago, or even 40 years ago.

[tsimionescu]

Here [0] is a study that found that, with the current trend, climate-related deaths per year in 2100 will be near the total infectious-disease related deaths per year today.

Also, Shenzen is only ~20th biggest city in the world [1], and its age is the exception, not the rule. The majority of the world's most populated cities are older than the countries they are located in, many of them being continuously inhabited since prehistoric times. Also, while creating a new city and populating it is possible with somewhat limited human harm (though rural->urban migration has its human impact, to be sure), deopopulating and moving a city of tens of millions (say, New York City, which sits at 10m elevation) is an entirely different scale of human displacement.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27599/w275...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

[tsimionescu]

Droughts followed by famines will become the order of the day in most of the world, wars will be fought for access to water, refugee crises the likes of which haven't been seen since for maybe 2000 years, greatly increasing the risk of nuclear holocaust (which is already at an all-time high, with the USA unilaterally withdrawing from its treaty with Russia, and exploring low-yield nuclear weapons), the rise of surveillance states now becoming possible to a degree that was barely even dreamed of before our time, a (mild) global pandemic showing how brittle our systems are and how much our leaders are willing to put economic benefit ahead of human life, the new rise of fascism in the US and Europe - we are well on the way to the worse centuries in recent human history.

Make no mistake: there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, on its current unchecked path, will end human civilization as we know it. That is not to say that there won't be a human civilization in 100 years, but there is no way for the current system to resist flooding of some of the world's largest cities and other densely populated areas, probably physically displacing more than 500 Million people, heat waves that will kill a healthy adult in the shade in much of the warmer regions, extreme weather events becoming increasingly common and more severe, and all of the consequences of these items - drought, famine, wars over land and drinking water, massacres to contain the migration of the hundreds of millions of people that will be displaced.

And of course, essentially every dollar of GDP growth that we currently make is only increasing the problems above, and will continue to do so on the current path.

The only way to avert the catastrophe is to drastically change our civilization today - to stop burning any fossil fuel or methane gas today, literally (yesterday would have been better), and take on all of the major economic overhaul that entails. Every day we continue to burn fossil fuels, to raise livestock in industrial numbers, to burn down forests etc is increasing the magnitude of the catastrophes to come (it is too late to completely avoid catastrophe, we can only hope to make them milder).

[esarbe]

Downvote all you like.

It won't change the facts.

[sedachv]

> The real world has never been better

Better for whom? And why do you think Bill Gates is any kind of authority on this subject? Read some of Derrick Jensen's writing instead.

[ImprobableTruth]

... you might want to add why Derrick Jensen is an authority instead. From a quick google search he just appears to be some random anprim guy that wrote some environmentalist books. Bill Gates has his foundation that is working to mitigate climate change, so I'd say he at least has some qualification since he is presumably in contact with scientific authorities. What does your guy have?

[kazagistar]

Not that I am in any way a fan of anprim thinking, but anyone with massive vested interest in the perpetuation of present day power dynamics (eg massive wealth) has negative starting authority when it comes to evaluating the quality of that world and the value of its preservation.

[sedachv]

Jensen, in addition to being a prolific author, is one of today's leading environmental and social philosophers. The only reason you know or care about who Gates is, is because he became very wealthy from predatory business practices. Kind of a stupid reason to pay attention to someone.

[ImprobableTruth]

I care about what Gates says because he's founded one of the world's largest charity organizations and has done a great deal to reduce human suffering as well as specifically a lot of work in regard to climate change. Being rich alone doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn what e.g. Jeff Bezos has to say about the matter.

Being a prolific author doesn't mean much to me and neither does being an environmental philosopher in this context. Someone like Peter Singer definitely is an authority on environmental ethics, but on the effect of climate change/the ecological state of the world I don't see why anyone would consider him an authority.

[sedachv]

> I care about what Gates says because he's founded one of the world's largest charity organizations

So your criteria for who is and is not worth listening to is "rich man who gives a lot of money to charity." Wealth is not some kind of superior substitute for expertise or insightful ideas. Unfortunately this seems to be a popular delusion today; that does not make it any less stupid.

[kortilla]

Better for the vast majority of the planet. Extreme poverty has been on a constant decline.

[tsimionescu]

Extreme poverty has been on a constant decline only as defined by the world bank (by choosing an arbitrary dollar amount of 1.90 international dollars that could barely buy some food, but not medicine or shelter).

In real terms, it has been stagnant or increasing, especially as people who were living well off the land have been forced to participate in the monetary economy or die of starvation.

And even by the world bank standards [0], the only gains have been because of China (a planned economy that has ignored any american or european economic orthodoxy), and to a lesser extent, India, which has mostly advanced by freeing itself from the burdens of colonialism (before colonialism, it was one of the richer areas of the world). In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has actually been increasing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:To...

[sltkr]

> In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has actually been increasing.

According to your source, only in absolute terms, not in relative terms. Ideally, both should go down of course, but it does mean a smaller percentage of Africans live in extreme poverty today than they did 25 years ago.

[kortilla]

> a planned economy that has ignored any american or european economic orthodoxy

I implore you to look up how China’s economy functions. It is successful because they threw away the majority of the “planned economy” bits of communism and have a capitalist economy. They have a stock market, citizens invest in companies they choose, starting a business doing whatever you want is easier there than many places in the US, businesses fail all of the time. None of those are features of a planned economy.

> and to a lesser extent, India, which has mostly advanced by freeing itself from the burdens of colonialism

It has little to do with that and more to do with making themselves globally competitive in many sectors (IT and outsourcing being obvious ones). They also operate under a capitalist economy that fosters these successful projects.

> In real terms, it has been stagnant or increasing, especially as people who were living well off the land have been forced to participate in the monetary economy or die of starvation.

Funny how people throw out actual concrete definitions and then say things like “In real terms” without providing any kind of definition. Maybe start by defining that.

Furthermore, the amount of people who were “living off of the land” are included in the 1.90 figure measured by the world bank. That’s not based on receipts at the grocery store or tax returns.

Finally, the number of people “living well off of the land” (who just were fucked if they got meaningfully suck btw) is vanishingly small compared to how many were “living malnourished off of the land”.

[tsimionescu]

You are looking at how China's economy functions today in a few cities, and not how it functions in the vast majority of the rest of the country. More importantly, while China has mostly or entirely gotten rid of the planned economy, it's success has come in large part because of massive monetary interference by the state in the economy, protectionism, forcing western companies to give up some of their IP to do business there, and of course a good dose of slave labor, like every successful economy in history unfortunately (I am absolutely opposed to this last one, and it is one of the things we have profited most from in Chinas's growth).

Countries that moved from a planned economy to capitalism under the IMF and WB's guidance have generally rushed to privatize their industry, have accepted and dutifully implemented all international IP treaties, have opened up their arms to foreign investors and sold their industries to them, and are almost all in much worse situations than China, with no hope of regaining the lost ground for now.

For India, I will only say one thing - India would not have been an IT powerhouse if it had been under colonial rule. The British wanted cotton and spices and other raw or lightly processed materials from India, and that is what it would have been forced to do - same as the path the American colonies rebelled against. Industrializationa and high-technology was for the mother land, not the colonies, in the horrible economic principle of the 'competitive advantage'.

---

Related to poverty, you're right, I probably should have given a definition. Extreme poverty means not having access to one or more of the the basic necessities of life - water, enough food not be malnourished, enough shelter not to die of hypothermia or heat, and access to medical care to survive the most common diseases in your region. If you have only these basic necessities and nothing else, you are still poor, but not living in extreme poverty.

From what I understand, the monetary threshold for these should be somewhere around 15 dollars per day to get out of extreme poverty (note that this 'income' includes begging, access to communal resources etc). There are of course many opinions on this number. However, the 1.9 USD value is pitifully low, and you can easily check that yourself: please think about what you can buy for 3 USD in you region each day, without any kind of borrowing, begging, living off the land, sharing etc (as those are already included in the number). Would you consider yourself to not be in extreme poverty?

Note that if we look at malnourishent, the percentage and number of people who are malnourished has stayed roughly the same since we started collecting data (1981), after increasing steadily up to ~2000.

And about people living off the land, they are indeed included in the data since 1981, but not in the data since 1800, as often presented.

Edit: and yes, you are right that people living off the land were usually doomed if they got significantly sick. But this is also true of, for example, everyone living on minimum wage in the US today, so I fail to see what's improved.

[hungryforcodes]

Wow, so having kids is the only way to be a participating human being in life and climate change?

[rv-de]

> As cynical as I am

okay ... are you ready?

> She doesn’t understand racism

give her and her friends blue t-shirts and an equal number of other kids red t-shirts. do this for several weeks. lo and behold the basis of racism unfold.

racism is an inherent human feature which can only be overcome by education. something adults have to provide for children.

[evan_]

This is a ridiculous claim disproven daily by thousands of daycares practicing color-coded stable groups.

[rv-de]

Last time I checked children bully each other over their clothes and form sub-groups based on them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513287/

It likely also depends on how prominent the color coding is. Just a marker would probably be too abstract for children to be factored in. But I'd question your claim if children are clad differently in an obvious fashion like different shirt colors f.x.

[evan_]

The programs I have knowledge of use bandannas.

The study you posted does not describe children bullying or forming subgroups based on wearing a color shirt.

[marbletiles]

No, racism is not an inherent human feature. A claim like that needs better justification than ... none at all.

[jussij]

Humans don't seem to require much in the way of a push before racist tendencies emerge:

https://exploringyourmind.com/blue-eyes-and-brown-eyes-the-j...

[marbletiles]

Suspect there’s more going on there than the naive explanation. Repeatability breaks down quite easily:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/oct/18/racism-psych...

[dd36]

Racism is a lazy mental short cut. It reminds me of Robert Cialdini’s research.

[pfisch]

ingroup and outgroup is an inherent feature of ALL social animals.

[0_____0]

ingroup/outgroup behavior ≠ racism

[pfisch]

racism is just a subgroup that is a type of ingroup/outgroup behavior.

[marbletiles]

Spoken French is just a subgroup that is a type of communication behaviour, which is an inherent feature of all social animals.

Doesn't mean speaking French is innate or inherent.

[globular-toast]

Where do you think it comes from? Elephants? Of course it's an inherent human feature.

[kazagistar]

Christmas isn't an inherent human feature.

[globular-toast]

No, but marking significant events and anniversaries seems to be. Speaking English isn't inherent, but speaking is. The specific kind of racism you're thinking about probably isn't, but people preferring and trusting people more like themselves is.

[flyinglizard]

The argument that less advanced societies are more racist or acceptive of racism, strongly supports the claim you are dismissing.

[devin]

I'm glad someone has all of the answers.